Electronic office systems frequently provide for the sharing of information. One technique for meeting this need is through the use of data repositories called electronic libraries. These electronic or shared libraries are capable of being accessed not only by users of a common network, but also other users of networks of interconnected pieces of equipment and programs. A user (end user) may be any person, device, program, or computer system that utilizes the systems for data processing and information exchange. With the increase in the number of users able to retrieve and store information in these libraries, the problem of retrieving information once it has been stored has increased. Enterprises storing and retrieving information in these shared libraries require quick and rapid access. An enterprise may be any economic organization. An enterprise may be a conglomerate, a company, a set of departments within a company, or a single department within a company. One prior art method for handling the exchange of information between an enterprise and a shared library is the Document Interchange Architecture (DIA).
DIA is a program-to-program communication architecture which defines the protocols and data structures, which when followed or used by programmers, enables programs to interchange information such as documents and messages in a consistent and predictable manner. DIA is independent of the type of information that is stored in a shared library and provides a defined set of parameters that describes the contents of information being transmitted such as the name under which the information is filed, the authors, the subject of the information, the date the information was filed, and keywords. These DIA architected descriptors enable a document to be searched in the library by an enterprise or other end user.
However, the current definition of DIA does not allow an enterprise or end user to add unique descriptors to information stored in the shared library beyond DIA architected descriptors. As a result, an enterprise such as a bank is limited to searching the shared library using such DIA architected descriptors as author, subject matter, or date filed. The enterprise cannot issue searches using search terms with the semantics of "Bank Account ID" or "Loan Identifier". In the same way, a manufacturing enterprise cannot access the library using search terms with the semantics of "Parts" or "Inventory".
Consequently, what is needed is a method to allow an enterprise to define the syntax and semantics of search terms that are specific to that enterprise.